Assassinations....if you could take one back

I'd go for Kennedy's because of the chaos that his assassination threw the country into, including the disastrous administration of Lyndon Johnson and possibly even prevented Richard Nixon's fiasco.

However, we should be cautious what we wish for when we wish to change the past. By that I mean that even though we can't change the past, we must recognize that from our limited view it is impossible to know precisely what the world might be like now if some event had not happened, especially on the macro-level.

On a micro level, Kennedy's family might have wished that Kennedy had not gone to Dallas or that he might have not declined the use of the protective bubble for his limousine because they might have not lost a father, a husband, an uncle, etc.

However, from a macro-level, we don't know if Kennedy's death might have set up a chain of events that might have had a positive effect on America.

If Kennedy had not died on November 22, 1963, the world would be very different today and we are not at all certain if things would have been better or worse.



[edit on 2008/5/20 by GradyPhilpott]

Within our times, I would say the assasination that had the biggest impact on history would be......

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

It is possible that WW I could have been prevented. In preventing WWI we may have been able to avoid the events that led to the rise of Nazi Germany thus perhaps preventing WWII as well. (Its a longshot but who knows)

Governor George Wallace.

Had he not been gunned down and paralyzed in 1972, it's very likely that Wallace would have gained enough votes on the Democratic ticket to act as "kingmaker" at the convention –– possibly even catapulting himself into the VP spot.

Had that been the case, there's no way McGovern would have been the Dems' choice. A Humphrey-Wallace ticket would have kept the more than 15 million Wallace votes that defected to Nixon-Agnew, possibly making the election's final outcome so close that it would've had to be decided in the House of Representatives. Indeed, a Humphrey-Wallace ticket would've had a better-than-even chance of turfing Nixon from office. This would have hastened the end of the Vietnam War, reshaped U.S. foreign policy for the next 20 years ... and might possibly have resulted in the Governor himself ascending to the presidency in 1976 or 1980.

Considering that the "new conservatism" of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush that Americans fell in love with in the 1980s was really only a watered down version of what Wallace was pushing for in the 1960s and '70s, you have to wonder how much further down the "right" path the U.S. would be travelling today if Arthur Bremer hadn't pumped those five bullets into the feisty Alabama populist.